[1.7.0] Metaclass - Mage Knight

[Phoenix1]

Okay, uploaded a patch. I think (maybe, I hope) that should get rid of the issue where non Mage Knights are getting talents converted to Magic. It also prevents Eldritch Body from affecting Prodigies, which was an oversight in the first place.

I found a couple places where my self.mk_power or 0 wasn't in parentheses, so fixed those.

Also halved the number of sustains removed by Mana Blast (upped the damage increase for each spell affected to compensate), and halved the amount of cooldown applied to talents by Mana Burst.

[monilas]

It seems that the Eldritch Body effect to use Magic in place of Str or Dex to level up your talents is being lost after the initial application.

That is, if I create a new MK (or adventurer and splash MK) it behaves as expected, but if I save the game, exit, then load the save, the armour talents (as an example) are back to using Str or Dex again.

Its an interesting set of classes though, thanks for sharing your work.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

Resurrecting this thread because it's one of my favorite classpacks and I have a question.

In the last several games I've played, I've played each of the mage knight classes. In each of these games, a truly ridiculous amount of rare enemies spawned as Mage Knights. As in, easily 9 out of 10 rares that I found were mage knights. I just cleared four of them in Maze:1 alone. Not EVERY rare is an MK, but easily MOST of them are.

I was just curious if anyone else was having this trouble as well. I usually disable Mage Knight when I'm not playing one just for this reason, as a poorly placed Phoenix Knight or Sea Knight can end a run in a matter of seconds on most characters, and they're frighteningly common.

[Phoenix1]

It seems that the Eldritch Body effect to use Magic in place of Str or Dex to level up your talents is being lost after the initial application.

That is, if I create a new MK (or adventurer and splash MK) it behaves as expected, but if I save the game, exit, then load the save, the armour talents (as an example) are back to using Str or Dex again.

Its an interesting set of classes though, thanks for sharing your work.

I've got an update in the works, and one of the things it'll do once I get it done is fix this bit. Hopefully for real this time.

Resurrecting this thread because it's one of my favorite classpacks and I have a question.

In the last several games I've played, I've played each of the mage knight classes. In each of these games, a truly ridiculous amount of rare enemies spawned as Mage Knights. As in, easily 9 out of 10 rares that I found were mage knights. I just cleared four of them in Maze:1 alone. Not EVERY rare is an MK, but easily MOST of them are.

I was just curious if anyone else was having this trouble as well. I usually disable Mage Knight when I'm not playing one just for this reason, as a poorly placed Phoenix Knight or Sea Knight can end a run in a matter of seconds on most characters, and they're frighteningly common.

They pop up regularly enough to be noticeable for me, but I wouldn't call them the vast majority. I didn't do anything that I know of to influence their creation, but I don't know anything about how rare generation is done so I can't rule out some unforeseen interaction.

[HousePet]

Insert random_rarity = 2, into the birth descriptor table of the class.
Higher value means rarer.

[nsrr]

I remember that when I was playing this a lot it seemed like there were a lot of MK classes popping up as enemies... but I figured it was just a combination of probablity and confirmation bias.The pack adds six classes. There are 30ish in base ToME, depending on DLC and excluding a couple that do not appear as enemies. So your odds of running into one are around 1 in 6, whereas your odds of running into any particular class is 1 in 36. So, looking at it that way, your odds of running into a MK are higher, much higher, than for any given class, but there's nothing odd about that. Except for the fact that our brains are wired to pick out patterns and try to apply reasoning to things. Even things that are already reasonable, if not at first glance.

[seattlesid]

This is just awesome. Nice work Phoenix1! I have only played the Mind Knight so far but what a blast. ....and you're right, the Eldritch Aura effect is sweet. I know it seems crazy but it's honestly a big draw for me in playing the class.

I'm running an antimagic, Sholtar which is just super sweet (for this armature).

https://te4.org/characters/63290/tome/c ... 6b124b8434

Side note: Maybe Sholtar is denying me the bonuses of other races but I am happy with the talent options and the fact that I can switch them out at top effectiveness!. ....like these...
Skate: 5.0 (movement speed +50%)
Realign 5.0 (currently healing for just over 1k and removing up to 3 physical affects)


Thanks!

[Phoenix1]

Thanks!

Okay, been a while, but I have uploaded a new version. This was another fairly significant revision, so the OP has been updated with current talent descriptions and such. I won't list all the changes, but the biggest ones are:

-The stupid Eldritch Body abilities glitches should actually be fixed for real this time hopefully!
-Mind knights do now have a form of telekinetic wielding. It's not the sort of direct damage boost that a mindslayer's is, but it has the same kind of style and suits their specialties.
-Eldritch Combat now only checks to trigger 1/round (usually), though its base chance is now higher. This makes multiple attacks less powerful for mage knights generally. This also makes projection weapons no longer the absolute no-contest best choice always for them, which is important because...
-New artifacts! Each mage knight class has two tier-5 artifacts that while useful for various characters, are especially geared towards them, and form a set with each other. This is always at least one weapon, but the exact items are based on the "traditional" fighting style for the given class. The items do have a fairly low rarity, since it's like...it's an addon, the stuff might as well show up, right?
-Lore! There are ten pieces of lore that allow the mage knights to actually fit at least semi-logically into the world (and some of the talent changes serve to reinforce some of the information presented in the lore).

I haven't fully balance-tested the changes, so there might be more updates over the next few days/weeks as I take a closer look at things.

[Razakai]

I do like the sheer imagination behind a lot of the stuff here, but I feel in some cases you might be better served with reducing the complexity for the sake of player understanding. Things like talents that require players to figure out rank squared stand out - did you know some npcs have a rank of 3.2 for... reasons? I'm imagining a player desperately breaking out a calculator to figure out whether they have enough stacks of tempo to step next to that boss and kill it, or if they'll ineffectually waste a turn and die.
Though this is an addon after all so you're free to make it as complex as you like, but I've definitely had to sacrifice complexity on my DLC classes and things have worked out all the better for it.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

Shriek of Challenge (Phoenix Knight) is bugged. It throws a Lua error when you activate it and then cancel it without firing it off -

Code: Select all

Lua Error: /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:121: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:162: /data-mageknight/talents/phoenix.lua:475: bad argument

And when actually using it, sometimes you fly to the targeted enemy, and sometimes you don't go anywhere and some enemies are pulled to your current location instead.

[Phoenix1]

Thanks guys, patch uploaded.

I do like the sheer imagination behind a lot of the stuff here, but I feel in some cases you might be better served with reducing the complexity for the sake of player understanding. Things like talents that require players to figure out rank squared stand out - did you know some npcs have a rank of 3.2 for... reasons? I'm imagining a player desperately breaking out a calculator to figure out whether they have enough stacks of tempo to step next to that boss and kill it, or if they'll ineffectually waste a turn and die.
Though this is an addon after all so you're free to make it as complex as you like, but I've definitely had to sacrifice complexity on my DLC classes and things have worked out all the better for it.

It's almost comforting to know that my tendency for over-complexity still applies even when the actual rules are all being processed by a computer . I'll probably put more thought into streamlining the actual effect once I see how it balances out, but in the meantime I've at least enumerated the costs per rank in the description so the math itself is transparent. (And also rounded ranks down to deal with weird edge cases because yeah I had no idea those existed).

Shriek of Challenge (Phoenix Knight) is bugged. It throws a Lua error when you activate it and then cancel it without firing it off -

Code: Select all

Lua Error: /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:121: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:162: /data-mageknight/talents/phoenix.lua:475: bad argument

And when actually using it, sometimes you fly to the targeted enemy, and sometimes you don't go anywhere and some enemies are pulled to your current location instead.

Fixed the Lua error. The second one sounds like how it's supposed to work. Shriek of Challenge charges an enemy if you target it, and then either way it pulls enemies in at your new position. It requires you to target an enemy directly though; it's a strict close-in talent, not a general mobility talent. So if you target just a patch of ground you'll stay still and it will just proceed with the pull in.

EDIT: Actually, while I'm at it, went in and toned down Shriek of Challenge and some of the sea knight stuff a bit.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

Shriek of Challenge charges an enemy if you target it, and then either way it pulls enemies in at your new position. It requires you to target an enemy directly though; it's a strict close-in talent, not a general mobility talent. So if you target just a patch of ground you'll stay still and it will just proceed with the pull in.

Right, several times I targeted an enemy and didn't move anywhere. But several other times, I targeted an enemy, and did the jump. I can't figure out what the logic is, to be quite honest, it seems very random whether or not it jumps me. Best guess I can hazard is that it checks accuracy to see if it hits, and if it doesn't hit, it doesn't move you but still does the pull (I think). I understand the logic behind this but I still think that targeting an enemy should make you always jump to that enemy, whether or not it connects with the attack. Blindside does this (as the best example I can think of right now as a "jump to enemy skill that requires an enemy"), Phoenix Wings did this before the round of meganerfs where it was removed, and more importantly, Focused Strike does this and is much more reliable doing so than Shriek is. Shriek is a 1pt tax right now on the way to Cleansing and Phoenix Burn, and while the effect of it can be very strong, I probably won't use it outside of certain specific situations. If I'm using a movement skill it means that I want to move. I would make Shriek either drop its movement component entirely, and simply be an AoE pull+hit, or make the movement component always fire off whether or not the initial attack hits.

Edit: I haven't tried the new version yet though, I want to finish/kill my existing character first. Will be back with more feedback after that.

[Phoenix1]

Yeah it should always jump. I'll check it again, if it's being random I might have just not seen it in my testing.

[Hunter]

I've enjoyed playing with this class for a while now, though it's probably a touch overpowered, especially the generic Combat Casting allowing the combination of various skills and traits one would normally have to spend a significant number of class/generic/category points on. But it's still fun and the overpowered aspects aren't game-breaking, especially when you play with dual-class and higher difficulty modes a lot, like I do, and are regularly facing some extremely dangerous Uniques and Bosses with these talents.

I haven't had a chance to play the latest updates, but are the descriptions of everything listed in the OP completely updated? If so, you've removed what was probably the single most over-powered skill in the class, the Mind Knight's ability to permanently move bits of terrain (Hey, trap that idiot your escorting until you clear the level! A dangerous summoner annoying you while you're fighting off other monsters? Lock the guy in a corridor until you can deal with him at your leisure. And so on.) If it's still there, then, well, it's quite overpowered.

I do have a question. What triggers certain skills to go unavailable (as in, inaccessible, not on cooldown)? The descriptions don't seem to tell me, or at least I'm not getting it. For instance, Astral Jaunt will be unavailable at times, which is frustrating if I want to do a controlled teleport.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

Stupid question, but are you sure you have enough Psi to cast it?